STARYL End-of-Year Colloquium: Archives as Sites of Radical Resistance

Thank you to everyone who has supported us throughout this last year. We could not have run STARYL without our amazing speakers who shared their amazing work with us, our audience who came, listened, and learned, and our funders who enabled us to pay our speakers. As most members of STARYL graduate this year, the colloquium is intended to be our final event, representing the culmination of our efforts to enact institutional change.

We have two phenomenal keynote speakers and a panel of inspirational figures in the field who will share their thoughts on ‘Archives as Sites of Radical Resistance’. Additionally, we will have two fun and relaxing opportunities to network with like-minded scholars and to form connections across disciplines, institutions, and industries. Finally, we will be launching our own archive that holds a record of our experiences of this intervention. Messy, raw, and real, this archive documents our successes and our failures, and our greatest hope is that it will help future students who want to create sites of joyful resistance.

Opening Keynote (Monday 14 June, 7pm BST)

Dr. Temi Odumosu (PhD, Kings College, Cambridge) is an art historian, curator, and Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Malmö University in Sweden. She is the author of 'Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes White Humour' (2017). Her research interests include colonial visual cultures and archives, post-memorial art and performance, ethics-of-care in re-presentation, and critical data/digitisation practices. Overall, she is focused on the multitude ways art can mediate social transformation and healing. She is currently a member of the research network The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories.

Social Event: Mapping and Making Connections (Tuesday 15 June, 7pm BST)

Roundtable (Wednesday 16 June, 7pm BST)

Aimée Felone is managing director of Knights Of – a commercial children’s publisher whose main focus is publishing inclusively by commissioning writers and illustrators from a diverse range of backgrounds, as well as hiring diversely. At Knights Of she has opened Brixton’s only children’s bookshop, Round Table Books, which exclusively stocks titles from underrepresented authors and illustrators.

Farrah Serroukh is a Learning Programme Leader at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE). She has always worked hard to centre margialised voices and keenly advocated for inclusive practices both within and outside of the education sector. Among other responsibilities, she co-leads on the research and development strand of the CLPE’s work. She is the author of CLPE’s 'Reflecting Realities Survey of Ethnic Representation within UK Children’s Literature' and leads on the groundbreaking and award-winning work in this area.

Ken Wilson-Max is an award-winning author, illustrator, and publisher of over 70 inclusive children’s books. He is amongst the 100 Breaking New Ground British writers and illustrators of colour in the UK, and his books are listed in '150 important Children's Books' by the African American Literature Book Club. He is a mentor for the Pathways into Children's Publishing program and passionate about redressing the diversity imbalance in children's publishing through inclusion.

Social Event: BYOB - Bring Your own Books (Thursday 17 June, 7pm BST)

Closing Keynote (Friday 18 June, 7pm BST)

Lavinya Stennett is the founder and CEO of The Black Curriculum, a social enterprise that aims to deliver black British history all across the UK. The vision to create The Black Curriculum came from first-hand experiences in British formal education, where Lavinya witnessed the effects of systemic disenfranchisement through the exclusion of Black pupils and Black British history. She is determined to challenge the Eurocentricity of the school curriculum at a nationwide level and believes in the power of education, and the arts to ultimately transform the lives of people.